Personalized medicine: genes, biomarkers and tailored treatment

Personalized medicine is gaining recognition due to limitations with standard diagnosis and treatment; many areas of medicine, from cancer to psychiatry, are moving towards tailored treatment for individual patients based on their genetic signatures and clinical characteristics. Advances in whole genome sequencing have allowed the identification of genes involved in a large number of diseases, and biomarkers that indicate disease severity or susceptibility to treatment are increasingly being characterized. The continued identification of new genes and biomarkers specific to disease subtypes and individual patients is essential for translation into personalized medicine, in terms of estimating both disease risk and response to therapy. This article collection covers recent advances in personalized medicine across all areas of medical science and clinical practice, demonstrating that patient-tailored treatment is being employed for some diseases, whereas more work is required to translate scientific advances into the clinic for others. We are seeking submissions of original research, reviews and debates offering insights into new advances in this exciting area of medicine.

In this video Q&A, we talk to Paul Wicks about the emergence of participant-led research, and discuss how this field may be expected to develop in the near future, particularly with regard to personalized medi...

Personalized medicine is increasingly being employed across many areas of clinical practice, as genes associated with specific diseases are discovered and targeted therapies are developed. Mobile apps are also...

Prostate cancer screening depends on a careful balance of benefits, in terms of reduced prostate cancer mortality, and harms, in terms of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. We aimed to estimate the effect on ove...

Clinical pathologies draw us to envisage disease as either an independent entity or a diverse set of traits governed by common physiopathological mechanisms, prompted by environmental assaults throughout life....

Considerable variety in how patients respond to treatments, driven by differences in their geno- and/ or phenotypes, calls for a more tailored approach. This is already happening, and will accelerate with deve...

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide in part due to our inability to identify which smokers are at highest risk and the lack of effective tools to detect the disease at its earliest and p...

This opinion article on the management of type 2 diabetes considers the old and new format of guidelines and critical changes in the character of such guidelines. We highlight limitations of the guidelines and...

More women die from breast cancer across the world today than from any other type of malignancy. The clinical course of breast cancer varies tremendously between patients. While some of this variability is exp...

Methotrexate (MTX) is the central drug in the management of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and other immune mediated inflammatory diseases. It is widely used either in monotherapy or in association with other synth...

Significant advances have been made in understanding the genetic basis of systemic sclerosis (scleroderma) in recent years. Can these discoveries lead to individualized monitoring and treatment? Besides robust...

Obesity is recognized as a global health crisis. Bariatric surgery offers a treatment that can reduce weight, induce remission of obesity-related diseases, and improve the quality of life. In this article, we ...

Risk-stratified treatment recommendations facilitate treatment decision-making that balances patient-specific risks and preferences. It is unclear if and how such recommendations are developed in clinical prac...

Since 2009, several studies have identified single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) near the gene encoding for interleukin (IL)-28 (IL28B) that are strongly associated with spontaneous and treatment-induced hepati...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common arrhythmia of substantial public health importance. Recent evidence demonstrates a heritable component underlying AF, and genetic discoveries have identified common variant...

Personalized treatment is highly desirable in multiple sclerosis because it is an immensely heterogeneous disease. This heterogeneity is seen in both the disease course and the treatment responses. Currently, ...

Significant advances in our understanding of the biology of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) have been achieved in recent years. These insights have led to the introduction of novel targeted therapies, revolutionisi...

Epidemiologic evidence supports a genetic predisposition to stroke. Recent advances, primarily using the genome-wide association study approach, are transforming what we know about the genetics of multifactori...

While diagnosis has traditionally been viewed as an essential concept in medicine, particularly when selecting treatments, we suggest that the use of diagnosis alone may be limited, particularly within mental ...